This Book is Cruelty-Free: Animals and Us

By Linda Newbery

If you've ever wondered how you can make your diet cruelty-free, whether it's ethical to own a pet, or if insects are actually important – this book is for you. Learn how to make the right choices to live a cruelty-free life and demystify the morals and ethics around animals and wildlife.

How do the everyday choices you make affect animals and the environment? This book looks at all the things you can do to live cruelty free. 

It's a guide for older children and teenagers concerned about animals, wildlife and the planet we live on.

Packed with information on how to live a cruelty-free life, it includes sections on:

Using your spending power. The choices we make – what to eat, what to buy, what to wear – and how these affect animals. Asking questions and reading labels.

Cruelty-free fashion and beauty.

What's on your plate? Being vegetarian or vegan, or just eating less meat? What impact can your diet have on cruelty and on the environment?

Should you have a pet? If so, would your pet choose you as its owner? Points to consider before bringing an animal into your home.

Animals on show. Do zoos and animal parks look after animals or exploit them? Good zoos and their important conservation work.

Watching wild animals. Watching and learning about wildlife – building an appreciation of nature and helping your mental wellbeing.

Love those bugs! Many people are squeamish about insects, but these creatures are vital to ecosystems.

Don’t throw it away – there is no away. Simple things everyone can do to avoid waste: recycling, re-using, choosing plastic-free. Resist the throwaway culture.

Where do you draw your line? What can you realistically achieve? Some of the difficulties, especially if family / friends don’t agree with you. What are the best (and worst) ways of influencing others? How to feel confident with your decisions.

How to handle everyday situations and counter arguments.

Campaigning – anti-cruelty organisations to support. The power of protest.

This book will help you to live as cruelty-free as possible and to examine all of the areas in your life where you can help animals and the environment.

Choose to live without cruelty. Choose this book and find out how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jul 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781843655183

Book preview

INTRO

If you have a dog at home – or if you spend time with a friend or relative’s dog – you’ll know that it has different moods, behaviours, likes and dislikes. It lets you know very clearly when it wants to play or go for a walk, or when it’s bored, frightened or hungry.

I’ve never owned a dog, but I’ve had a number of cats over the years, most of them re-homed from animal shelters. At present I have two cats, plus a regular visitor – a neighbour’s cat who calls in most days. All three have distinct personalities: one of ours, Fleur, is talkative and bossy. The other, Holly, is placid and gentle, while visitor Louis is lazy and sometimes playfully aggressive.

Anyone who’s kept chickens knows that they have favourite places and food treats, and they love to sunbathe, spreading their wings. They make a range of sounds: alarm calls, squeaks of excitement when given something tasty to eat, and the crooning purr that means they’re really content.

It’s not difficult to realize that animals have feelings. Like us, they experience fear, boredom, anticipation and pleasure. I think few people would deny that.

Yet the world around us sees some animals as more important than others. We’re taught to take good care of our pets, but to ignore what happens to animals seen as products for us to use. Many shops, businesses and advertisers don’t want us to consider how meat gets to supermarket shelves, what goes into their cosmetics or where their plastic packaging ends up. They just want us to buy their products.

Whether or not we have animal companions, the decisions we make every day of our lives – what we buy, eat, use and discard – have an impact on the environment and animal life. We can choose to support cruelty and waste, or we can choose kindness and responsibility. My own aim is to live in a way that causes as little harm as possible to animals and the environment. I don’t always succeed, and don’t think anyone can in our society, but I do try.

If this is your wish too, you’ll face some tricky decisions and some grey areas. In this book I don’t aim to give correct answers – you’ll need to decide for yourself, think about how your choices will affect your family and daily life, and what you can realistically manage. Even when you make your own rules, it may prove impossible to stick to them all the time. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing; small changes can make a difference.

Things can and do change. Fifty years ago it was acceptable for fashionable people to wear coats made from animal skins such as beaver, mink and fox; now many top designers have pledged never to use real fur. Vegetarians and especially vegans were once in a tiny minority – now we’re mainstream. Everyone knows about the harm caused by throwaway plastics; there are climate change protests in many countries, and countless campaigns to protect animals and habitats. We’ve realized at last that we can’t carry on treating the natural world as if it’s ours to waste and destroy.

What I want to do in this book is to look at the way our daily lives affect animals, examine how the choices we make when we go shopping or on holiday can make a difference, and how we can avoid exploiting animals by choosing kindness, not cruelty. I want to look at what we buy, wear and use, and what we throw away. And I want to explore how we can do better.

If you care about animals, I hope to show how simple changes in your life can make a difference – and how you might even influence other people. Every person who chooses cruelty-free shampoo, or avoids buying plastic, or decides to cut down on meat or stop eating it altogether, can begin to influence others. Change happens slowly – sometimes much too slowly – but it does happen. And that’s thanks to people who care about the world and its future. People like you and me.

IllustrationIllustration

AS HUMANS WE’VE GIVEN OURSELVES POWER OVER EVERYTHING ELSE THAT LIVES.

Asking if animals have rights is a complex moral, philosophical and even legal question.

If we ask whether animals have the same or similar rights as humans, including the right to live free and without mistreatment, the answer from the current world would have to be a resounding No – they don’t. As humans we’ve given ourselves power over everything else that lives.

This belief in human superiority is challenged by many in the environmental movement. But, as things are in law and custom, humans have assumed that we have the right to breed animals and own them, to kill and eat them, wear their skins and use them for medical research.

Perhaps the question we need to ask is: should animals have rights?

Peter Singer, a philosopher who concerns himself with the ethics of how we treat animals, uses the term speciesism in his book Animal Liberation. Just as racism, sexism and ageism assume that some people should have more rights than others, speciesism assumes that one species (humans) is more important than all others on Earth.

Singer says that even the word ‘animal’ is biased, as we nearly always take this to mean ‘non-human animal’ – although of course we’re animals, too. The phrase ‘behaving like animals’ is used insultingly, meaning that someone’s behaviour (or more likely it will be used about a group of people) is rough, brutal, deliberately cruel or sadistic. It shows that we think we’re above the rest of the animal world, purely because we belong to the species Homo sapiens. And in so many ways we use this to deny other animals any rights at all.

It’s argued that animals can’t have rights because they can’t understand the concept of morality, or because they don’t have the intelligence of humans. But we accept that a newborn human baby has rights without being expected to have any idea of morals or responsibility. And the intelligence argument hugely underestimates the cleverness of, for instance, dogs, dolphins, pigs, primates and some birds.

Laws regarding animals’ rights are contradictory – some are protected, while others can be killed indiscriminately. Penalties for deliberate cruelty are often too light, and bans against keeping animals aren’t imposed often enough on those found guilty of abuse.

It took until 2009 for the European Union to declare that farmed animals are ‘sentient beings’ – that they have feelings and can suffer. Until then, farm animals were classed as agricultural products, like cabbages or sacks of flour.

Welfare organizations around the world work hard in their efforts to ensure that animals – on farms, in zoos, in the wild, kept as pets – are treated with care and consideration. Yet this is always in conflict with the desire to exploit animals for profit and the need to provide food as cheaply as possible to a world hungry for meat and dairy products. In too many countries, animals have little or no protection in law.

I honestly can’t see a future in which animals are given the same rights as humans – and if they were, it would lead to further problems. What do we mean by animals? Which animals? If they were all given rights, would the right to live without persecution extend to fleas, locusts, malaria-spreading mosquitoes and the worms that live in the intestines of cats and dogs if not controlled? They’re all animals. A line would have to be drawn somewhere – but where and by whom?

Protecting garden insect life is one thing, but standing up for locust rights would be quite another. While I was writing this book, vast swarms of locusts were devastating crops in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. Farmers and smallholders could only watch in horror as the crops they’d been tending were devoured in less than a day. This was a huge crisis in terms of feeding the people of that continent. Maybe a very strict vegan would argue that the locusts shouldn’t be killed, but in the face of such terrible, widespread human and animal suffering that feels like a harsh line to take.

In general, though, surely humans have the duty to treat animals as sentient beings – creatures that can feel emotions such as joy and exuberance, grief and terror and pain. Even if we consider ourselves superior to other animals, we should accept the responsibility of looking after the natural world and not see it as ours to exploit and destroy, as if we are a swarm of locusts devouring everything in our path.

And surely animals have the right to be treated with consideration. Even if they can’t have the same rights as humans, it doesn’t follow that they have no rights at all, or that they exist solely for us to use. My view is that we should do all we can to respect their existence, preserve their habitats and avoid causing suffering. That means thinking about our daily lives and habits, whether or not we’re in direct contact with animals.

Peter Singer says in Animal Liberation that he doesn’t think of himself as an animal lover – in that he doesn’t own pets and isn’t even particularly interested in animals as a naturalist or zoologist would be. He’s concerned for animal rights just as he’s concerned for the rights of human beings he doesn’t know personally. It’s a question of morality and of living in the best way we